Surf Wiki
Save to docs
general/citizen-journalism

From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

Democratic journalism

Democratic journalism is a term describing a phenomenon where news stories are ranked by a vote among the stories' readers. This phenomenon has been brought about largely due to the creation of social networking sites such as Digg and Newsvine.

The effect of democratic journalism is that it promotes news based on the popular opinion of the majority, or the "wisdom of the crowd". This differs from more traditional approaches, such as the one commonly used in the newspaper industry, where an editor would decide whether to print a particular news story.

Some authors look at democratic journalism as taking in rights to free speech, assembly, human rights, the rule of law and other mechanisms to check abuses. It also takes in civic consciousness and social solidarity. Journalism then has a clear link with democracy, and is shaped accordingly. This would also have different meanings in First, Second and Third World nations. The democratic role of journalism should transcend excessive commercialism, sensationalism, and manipulation by media elites.

Problems

A common problem faced by democratic journalism is the unreliability and bias of the voting system used, which may not reflect the actual opinions of the majority. Many of the mediums which help enable democratic journalism suffer from problems such as gaming, bias, censorship, and lack of professional review. However, other approaches will also suffer from many of these problems. In order to get a set of news stories, at some point, something must decide one story's rank over another using some criteria. A different approach at making such a selection simply changes the source of the bias.

References

References

  1. Baase, Sara. A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing and the Internet. 3. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2007. Page 351. {{ISBN. 0-13-600848-8.
  2. Grave New World? Democratic Journalism Enters the Global Twenty-first Century. Berger, G. Journalism Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, 1 February 2000 , pp. 81-99(19) Published by Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group.
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

citizen-journalism citizen-media types-of-journalism
Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about Democratic journalism — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report